Item: Airtable
Rating: 8
Author: Ashutosh Kumar Buddhiraju

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Airtable is used to simplify operations and processes across various departments at SKY School. Two of the primary processes that Airtable takes care of in the school are Admission Process - from walk-in data capture, admission data mapping to student database, database of students availing transport etc. It brings the entire data access to just a click away (that was earlier scattered all across the organization). Another process is the Daily Lesson Plan Management, where every week the lesson plans are all systematically collected in one table in Airtable automatically synced with cloud, using Zapier. Digitizing the offline process to a completely online end-to-end solution has saved the organization many man-hours of menial labor.

Pros and Cons

Linking data from across verticals for easier data centralized management
Integration with Zapier makes Airtable a very powerful tool, within an ecosystem of many integrable applications
Frequent webinars to educate and support Airtable's users, and enrichment of the tool basis inputs and suggestions from users
Plethora of templates to choose from, easy to further refine it based on the particular usecase

Airtable forms can do better with section headers or page breaks or dividers for a long airtable form
If a field is formula field, then all cells in the formula field column in all records, will compulsorily have the same formula. Because of this, we can't have a custom Management Information System, with multiple summaries (different formulas) one below the other that summarize records from other tables in same base
When date filters are set in a view, there must be an option to schedule an update to the date in the date filter

Return on Investment

We save 7 man-hours in our organization by compiling our documents on Airtable. Earlier that time used to be spent on browsing through each of 40-50 emails sent every week
It offers the management a single-interface overview of what is running in various axes of the organisation. Which earlier used to take 2 hours per day for the team to come to same page
Teachers in the school who are not tech savvy, when introduced to a simple UI, enables their adoption of technology better

Alternatives Considered

Google Drive, Google Forms and Microsoft Office 2016

While almost all the alternatives of Airtable also collect, store and analyze data (spreadsheets), none are true databases. While Airtable, when deployed, can act from a process start to its end, automating the whole process. Airtable is more efficient than its alternatives to automate an entire process or standard operating procedure to cloud, bringing efficiency not only to data management and generation of insights, but also to overall operations in the organization. This is one of the primary reason why I selected Airtable.

Other Software Used

Zapier, SignRequest, Google Drive

Likelihood to Recommend

Airtable is best suited where centralization of data is required, where there are a lot of data dependencies (Relational Databases). For example, if there is walk-in for admission, data only needs to be captured at that point, then once it is in our system, we just would need to fetch this info for any further purposes, like when admission is done, or the student is availing transport, what is fee that needs to be paid, and also offers an easy way to follow up with the people concerned.

Airtable is less appropriate if we need advanced analytics to get done on the data collected. Although blocks help with some basic insights and analytics, and airtable can also be connected to multiple analytics and dashboards paid applications, Airtable still doesn't offer MS Excel level analytics and dashboards yet.

Airtable - Take all your Operations Processes to Cloud

Overall Satisfaction with Airtable